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France Loves its Cops

by Jacques-Alain Miller

From Paris, on the night of Monday 12 to Tuesday 13 January 2015

Never have the police in Paris been celebrated as they were yesterday afternoon. Three of them had died in the line of duty while protecting the comic troublemakers at Charlie who were busy at their cartoons and satires. Everyone lauded the devotion and the spirit of self-sacrifice of the police. No one dreamed of blaming them for the weaknesses in security strategies, nor for the seventeen deaths that resulted from the flaws in the system. On the contrary, everyone thanked the police forces, i.e. not only the flics (cops), but the gendarmes, the CRS[1], all the agents of the intelligence and security services. Above all, everyone was counting on them to protect us from further attacks, since experts in all fields, well-equipped with arguments, were announcing that more attacks were inevitable. Common sense could only agree. Everyone, both the brash and the fearful, knew and felt himself to be a potential target. Jews a bit more so than others: in fact much more so than others. Four Jewish people had been killed on Friday while doing their shopping. They all practiced their faith, at least to the extent that they respected some or all of the ancient dietary laws, some of which were undoubtedly instituted before the Revelation to Moses. In short, they shopped in a Kosher supermarket. Yet the tweets tagged #jesuisflic (Imacop) or #Respect for the police seemed to echo out into infinity on the social network, beyond the limits of any specific group or community.

Caught up in the same movement, those who belong to the generation –my generation– that had been through the events of May 1968, and who had shouted “CRS SS” in the streets of the capital half a century ago, were completely destabilized. They could no longer recognize themselves. It was as if they had undergone a kind of depersonalization: nothing serious, just a pleasant sort of lightness of being. An “estrangement,” to use Gide’s term. “I was surprised to find myself saying ‘good night’ to the CRS forces parked in their van at the foot of the building where Libé[2]has its offices. And I was not in any disagreement with those on Sunday’s march (which I still refer to as ‘la manif’[3]) who applauded the police forces, themselves completely astonished at being celebrated and applauded in such a friendly way” (Luc le Vaillant). Numerous accounts of these sudden conversions to the defense of public order came pouring in.

This makes me think of The Burial of the Count of Orgaz by Le Greco, that “masterpiece,” according to Barrés, “of a sentiment which is both Arabic and Catholic.” He describes it as follows: “The painting is composed of two parts: at the bottom, the funeral of the Count of Orgaz is taking place; above that, he is being welcomed into the heavenly sphere.” Indeed, it is as if the slaughter in the offices of Charlie has been reproduced in another sphere, by the metaphorical, mystical massacre of the “protesters” of 1968. As if the Kalashnikovs of the Kouachi brothers had, in some sense, knocked some sense into them.[4] It has taken nothing less that the wordless assassination of the die-hards at Charlie for this privileged age group, called the baby-boomers, to begin to see what its comfort, and its very survival owes, every day of its existence, to the dedication of the police forces that it had jeered at in its youth. Many of these feather-brains have waited to become old men and women to glimpse something of the arcane workings of the world: how Cities, Empires and States are upheld, what the price of order is, the emergence of “logical revolts,”[5] their fleeting nature, etc. In a word, everything that Lacan brings under the heading of “the discourse of the master.”

In truth, the former dissenters had hung up their arms long ago, and the Revolution that had once been their raison d’être was no longer but a dream, even to them. Occasionally, a new idea or hypothesis would emerge, but this mental universe was not in phase with their daily lives. They have been forced into a brutal aggiornamento. In their defense, it is true that the police they were dealing with in their younger days harked back to a time before “the French suicide.”[6] To borrow Zemmour’s terminology, it was a “virile” police force, formed during the Algerian war. It had even perpetrated a well-known massacre in Paris on October 17, 1961, and provoked the deaths of nine French communist-sympathizers at the Charonne metro station on February 8 of the following year. If one takes the time to think back to what the French police who came to arrest Jews (foreigners, Zemmour takes care to underline) and to take them to the Vélodrome d’Hiver[7] were like, one might be more indulgent with the youth of ’68 who tended to see the CRS, created by the socialist Jules Moch, as roughly equivalent to the troops of Heinrich Himmler.

That was long ago. Time has passed. Social control today takes more oblique and discreet pathways. The resentment towards the police is no longer what it once was, except amongst the poor of Arabic or African origin.[8] Nevertheless, the positive feelings and enthusiasm shown to the police by the Parisian population last Sunday is an unprecedented event in the history of France. What can occur in exceptional circumstances–without falling into a kind of romantic mythology which a certain De Gaulle never gave in to–is the osmosis between a population and the national army that protects it from outside aggressors. But the love of a population for the forces of internal repression? I can think of no precedent. Not even in the times of Ravachol and the anarchists. Perhaps further investigation will turn up some examples, but in the meantime, I see but one explanation: that the Islamist warrior is seen by the population to be a true domestic enemy. It is the mission of the police to fight him, just as the army combats an external threat. Proof to that effect is that the army is soon to be assigned[9] to the protection of Jewish schools and institutions. In such a context, while I can understand what is shocking and dangerous about the use of the expression ‘inside enemy’ employed by the Prime Minister, it does not seem entirely unfounded.

I mentioned earlier the conversion of the former protesters of ’68 to the new champions of public order. This word, conversion, has appeared in very recent days in the writing of Houellebecq,[10] who borrowed it from Huysmans. He captured the feeling in the air, and applied it to Islam. Yet, one must be careful here, the Islam in question is entirely opposed to Islamism. Such as Houellebecq portrays it in his satirical novel, it is a discourse which allows civil peace to reign, assures the security of goods and citizens, and provides full employment. Well, what we are witnessing now, in effect, and which is astounding in its magnitude, is a conversion to ‘securitarianism,’ a massive and sudden demand for security from the French population. But it goes by other paths than those foreseen by Houellebecq. France is experiencing a true passion for its police.

Will this state of enamoration last? Here, it is worth returning to Lacan’s conception of “logical time.”[11]

The instantaneous form appears first as “the instant of the glance”: this is the initial shock, the ‘insight’ as one says, the ‘epiphany’ in the sense popularized by Joyce. Then time as duration is reestablished: the subject thinks, chews over, supposes, cogitates and elaborates; you never know how long it will take him, nor by what regrets, suffering and dialectical processes he will need to pass. This is “the time for comprehending.” This is where we now stand. The French are thinking, talking, writing, the whole country is babbling and discoursing, caught up in intense intellectual activity. I can only suppose that this is also taking place in other European countries, in a minor key. France is a powerful nation, and suddenly, it has a gun to its head. That sharpens the senses. Each and every one of us is suddenly under a death threat. We are living under the rules of the imperfect tense as defined by the linguist Guillaume: “Un instant plus tard, la bombe éclatait.”[12] Did it go off? Yes? No? Impossible to decide. As for the third logical time, “the moment of concluding,” that will come later.

If we were to admit the hypothesis that the social phenomenon which we are witnessing and participating in has the structure of an infatuation, it is not hard to see what sort of love object is at stake. We can safely refer to Freud’s indications in his work entitled “On Narcissism” (1914). The police, as love object, seem to have been chosen according to the model of the “woman who takes care of her child”: the mother, the maternal Other, offering care and protection. The terror and feelings of distress that came in the wake of the massacre of Charlie’s journalists have precipitated the people of France into the arms of the Other. For the Jews, this Other goes by the name of Israel. Following this hypothesis, the collective subjection to the Other is being woven, thread by thread, on the basis of each subject’s relation to it. This is the lesson Freud offers in his analysis of group psychology.

That is not all. How could we fail to suppose that the massacres of these last few days have produced conversions to Islamism? These massacres are, in part, intended to do just that: recruit. Of course, those conversions remain invisible to us, they will only be revealed after the fact, but we can already understand to what sort of love object they will correspond. It is of a different sort: it is narcissistic. The subject loves himself as he would like to be, as a soldier of the Absolute, a Rambo of the Ideal, armed to the hilt, impervious to doubt, ready to give his life for the Cause, while, in the case seen above, the desire for life, the Primum vivere, dominates.

To conclude, for I have been rather long, I would like to underline the fact that the reference to Freud should not prevent us from recognizing that the masses who came out last Sunday had very little in common with the ‘crowds’ of the 19th century as described by Gustave le Bon,[13] of which Freud analyzes the structure in his work on group psychology.

It was not even a demonstration, just a march, not to say a wandering about. Not a speech, not a word… nothing. Everyone was silent. The only slogan was the now-famous ‘Je suis Charlie’ which has nothing of a master signifier about it to homogenize its subjects. It was more like a ‘buddy signifier’ and gave the gathering the feeling of a Spanish Inn, where each person brings along something of their own. According to the historian Pascal Ory, it is “the sign of the advanced individualism that characterizes our western societies” (Le Monde). We could see it like that. Susanna, a psychoanalyst and friend of mine from Tel-Aviv, puts it differently: “Seeing all the leaders lined up together, walking with interlocked arms, united in the absence of any goal, was pitiful. I think they have not only lost all hope, but worse than that, they have even lost their despair.” Yet, from Beirut, L’Orient le jour writes, “Yesterday, France stormed the Bastille.” Yes, well…

All agree that the image from this historical moment that will stick in everyone’s mind is that of François Hollande hugging the emergency services doctor and editorialist at Charlie, Patrice Pelloux, who was in tears. Hollande strokes his hair, his face. He rocks him gently in his embrace. Meanwhile, the other survivors of the Charlie team have caught the giggles: a pigeon has dropped its shit, bespattering the President’s shoulder.

P.S. the anecdote about the pigeon is recounted in Le Monde, Le Figaro, etc.; a video of it exists.

P.P.S. Mr. Roland Rouzeau has reminded me, by email, that the crime of blasphemy does still exist in Alsace and in Moselle. Duly noted.

Translated by Jennifer Murray

[1] CRS: the Republican Security Companies that assure public order and riot control. The ‘gendarmes’ have jurisdiction over rural areas and smaller cities, whereas the national police force is affected to major cities.

[2]Libération : a French national newspaper. Same for Le Monde, Le Figaro (see below).

[3]Manif – short for manifestation, means a ‘demonstration’ of a political nature.

[4] The original expression ‘mettre du plomb dans la cervelle’ plays on the double-meaning of ‘plomb’ which means ‘lead’; the literal meaning, ‘to put a bullet in the head,’ finds itself in tension with the figurative expression which means to give more ballast to a scattered way of thinking.

[5] An expression first found in “Democracy” by Arthur Rimbaud and which has entered philosophical debates.

[7] The Vélodrome d’Hiver is a bicycle stadium where victims of a mass arrest of Jewish people were grouped and held during a Nazi-directed raid in Paris in 1942.

[8] Numerous studies show that these populations continue to be more frequently targeted by police during identity controls.

[9] In fact these measures have now been put in place (Jan 15).

[10] Michel Houellebecq’s novel, Soumission, was in its promotional phase, and was the subject of polarized debate when the attack on Charlie Hebdo took place. Houellebecq has interrupted his promotional tour.

[11]Lacan published “Logical Time” in 1945. It was republished as “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty” in Ecrits, (Trans. Bruce Fink) 161-75.

[12] English cannot render the linguistic element here: the imperfect verb ‘éclatait’ carries both the value of the past: “the bomb went off” and the hypothetical future “One second later, and the bomb would have gone off.” The grammar in French makes the interpretation of the event undecidable.